Twenty thousands leagues inside the optical fiber

What actually happens as we provision a fleet of containers, chat with our remote colleagues, and let the operating system update itself? At the lowest physical layer, billions of photons need to fly around inside the fiber optic cables carrying terabytes of information.

This talk explores the historic journey of modern communication technologies, highlighting a series of scientific milestones in recent human history, from trapping photons inside a hair-thin strand of glass, modulating them on 40 different wavelengths, forcing the photons to travel thousands of miles, and finally stitching back the bits and pieces for full reassembly. The talk will be entertaining and useful, yet the material will be technical enough to tickle the geeky side of the audience and inspire further exploration.

Ariya Hidayat

Shape Security

Ariya Hidayat is the author of Esprima and PhantomJS. These days, he focuses mostly on software craftsmanship with HTML5, JavaScript, and other web technologies. Ariya is currently running the engineering team at Shape Security.